Now that we’ve finished planning our journey, its time to pack the bags and set sail. Once we have a finished plan and a contract to complete it, we mobilize our construction team and project partners to begin building. A binder is prepared to contain every detail of the project for your project leader to work from. A schedule is laid out and everyone involved is notified of their place in the plan. Products are ordered, building permits acquired, and start and finish dates set. We’re ready to go.
Before we begin we meet and listen again. This time it’s to transfer your relationship with us from the design to the construction team. Though the designers remain on call to clarify details and provide ongoing design input if necessary, the construction team steps in to take control and manage the execution of our design. All our effort in planning is to provide a clear set of instructions for the construction team to be guided by. They rely on our good work and assume your intentions have been made clear.
At this pre-construction conference your project leader walks you through the construction process, including a review of the plan, methods of communication, and site housekeeping issues. As always we will strive to communicate the systems that we rely on for success. This includes a contract everyone intends to follow, a set of plans and specifications that clearly identify all the parts, and a system that can accommodate requests for additional work or deal with unexpected conditions without interfering with the workflow.
Living through a building project requires everyone’s active participation. Your daily schedule and the ways in which you ordinarily use parts of your house are likely to be disrupted to varying degrees as the project unfolds. As with every other phase of this process, we have dealt with this hundreds of times before and expect to do everything we can to make the experience manageable. It’s an adventure and should be enjoyed for the process of change that it truly is.